Introduction

Ancient Egypt presents us with one of the longest-lasting, most stable political adaptations in human history. Like other ancient empires, Egypt involved large populations, with strong regional traditions, engaged in vigorous trade in luxury goods, under totalitarian governments supported in part by systems of religious myth, constricted by the natural world of geography and climate.

This essay is about the earliest emergence of the Egyptian state and the processes by which it moved from a hodgepodge of little Neolithic villages to a stable empire, headed by a totalitarian ruler considered to be a god. The essay introduces some of the archaeological evidence that must be taken into account in developing our best guess reconstruction of the story. It is a complicated story, and you may wish to read the Conclusions at the end before you start in order to see where it is all leading. Words with dotted underlining will be found in the glossary linked at the top of each page, where additional information is sometimes provided.

Ancient Egypt

The expression "ancient Egypt" refers to the civilization of a region that extends along the Nile River from its several mouths at the Mediterranean sea southwards, uphill and upstream, to a southern boundary that was different in different eras. In most periods the southern boundary was at a point near the modern town of Aswan, where the first of a series of formidable rocky areas in the river (called cataracts) always made river navigation difficult. This is where in modern times the Nile was dammed, forming Lake Nasser to the south, extending over the international border from Egypt into northern Sudan. The area to the north and south of Lake Nasser, as well as the area occupied by the lake itself, is referred to as Nubia, and throughout most of antiquity it was a tributary state to Egypt.

South (upstream) from Nubia, the Nile is really a group of feeder rivers, and it has always been difficult to be certain which one should be understood as the fabled "source of the Nile." North of Lake Nasser, it is a single river flowing northward in a single valley, referred to as "Upper Egypt" until it reaches roughly the area of modern Cairo (ancient Memphis), where it splits again into myriad different streams which spread out across a vast, often marshy river delta ("Lower Egypt") before spilling through many different mouths into the Mediterranean. (Caution: "Upper Egypt" is really "upstream Egypt," the narrow river valley in the South. "Lower Egypt" refers to "downstream Egypt," the delta lands in the North.)

"Ancient Egypt" extends in time from the appearance of written records and the founding of a unified state about 3100 BC through a sequence of 31 numbered dynasties up until the conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Since Alexander was immediately acclaimed as Pharaoh, he actually founded the 32nd dynasty, even though the numbering conventionally stops with him. Since Alexander was from Macedonia, in northern Greece, scholars speak of the "Macedonian Kings" (332-305 BC), followed by a "Ptolemaic dynasty" (305-30 BC), named after a series of monarchs descended from Alexander's friend Ptolemy, who had governed Egypt for Alexander from 323 to 305.

When Alexander died and his empire disintegrated, making Egypt became "independent" again in 305, Ptolemy continued to rule it "in his own right" as Pharaoh "Ptolemy I." He was succeeded by his son, who took the throne name Ptolemy II. In total, Greek rule over Egypt under a succession of Ptolemys was about 300 years, longer than the independent history of the United States.

The last of the Ptolemaic monarchs was, of course Cleopatra VII, memorialized in the famous story in which she and her lover Marc Anthony, the Roman general, tried and failed to prevent Egypt's absorption into the Roman Empire by Marc Anthony's nemesis, Octavian, who later become Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.

For convenience historians have blocked Egyptian dynasties together into three great "Kingdoms" (each lasting about twice as long as the United States has lasted so far), separated by almost equally long periods of less united or enduring rule, as shown in the following table. Experts disagree about the details, so I have tended to prefer round numbers here.

Predynastic Period

4000-3100 BC

(900 years)

Early Dynastic Period (1-2)

3100-2700

(400 years)

Old Kingdom (3-6)

2700-2230

(470 years)

First Intermediate Period (7-10)

2230-2140

(90 years)

Middle Kingdom (11-12)

2140-1750

(390 years)

Second Intermediate Period (13-17)

1750-1550

(200 years)

New Kingdom (18-20)

1550-1080

(470 years)

Third Intermediate Period (21-26)

1080-664

(416 years)

Saïte Period (26) (Assyrian Domination)

664-525

(139 years)

Late Period (27-31) (Persian Domination)

525-332

(193 years)

Macedonian & Ptolemaic Period ("32")

332-30

(302 years)

Roman & Byzantine Periods ("33")

30 BC -AD 641

(671 years)

Much of our basic knowledge about Egyptian history comes from the writings of a certain Manetho, whom the Roman writer Plutarch describes as having been an adviser to Ptolemy I, Alexander's friend. It was Manetho, in his Notes About Egypt, who divided pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian history into the numbered dynasties.

Other important text sources are ancient "king lists," fragments of which occasionally survive on stone or, in one case, papyrus. To the extent that they overlap, most of these lists seem to agree with each other, and with Manetho.

Manetho wrote in Greek, and so the kings, gods, and places in his account had Greek (or more exactly "Hellenized" or "Grecized") names, and many Egyptian archaeological sites therefore have three names: The ancient Egyptian name (if known), the Greek name by which it may have been discussed by Manetho or subsequent writers, and the Arabic name given to it by local people today.

More or less throughout this long period Egypt had several quite constant characteristics which are important for our understanding of the origin of the Egyptian state and for its extraordinary stability for so many centuries:

Unified Political Authority. Egypt was usually united politically under a single, authoritarian monarch called a Pharaoh. For this reason the dynastic period is sometimes called Pharaonic (fair-ay-ON-nick) Egypt.

Divine Ruler. The Pharaoh was considered to be divine, and much of Egyptian mythology and religion was involved with sustaining this belief. In this regard he resembled many monarchs of states further south along the Nile that are known to us from written records by literate visitors over the most recent couple of centuries.

Chronic Dryness. Rain fell extremely rarely if ever in the Nile valley during the Pharaonic period. Thus the only water available was what flowed down the Nile from mountains far to the south. Outside the basin of the Nile, all was a very dry desert. There was an occasional oasis here and there, but for practical purposes the desert was unsuited to human habitation, a land the Egyptians associated with death and little else.

Annual Flooding.
Fed by the seasonal monsoons a thousand miles to the south, the level of the Nile rose and fell on an annual basis, producing a more or less predictable flood in much of the valley beginning in July or August, and finally receding towards the end of October, a rhythm that continued until the creation of Lake Nasser. As the floodwaters receded, the river left very fertile black mud over the land. This was the basis of Egyptian agriculture. The flood plain was affectionately referred to as the "Black Land" (kmt), in contrast to the frightening desert wastes, which were called the "Red Land" (dshrt).

Fertile Northern Delta. In northern, "Lower," Egypt, about where Cairo is located today (and where Memphis was located in Pharaonic times), the river splits into different streams, which themselves split into many streams, so that one speaks of the "mouths" of the Nile where it flows northward into the Mediterranean. The deposited mud gradually built the coast out into the sea in a vast river delta, in which the rising waters would overflow their shallow banks and then create new watercourses as the water level went down again. Thus the Nile Delta was a marshy area, with immensely fertile land and shallow lakes, mostly located at some distance from the dreaded desert Red Land. Even to the present time, the northern Delta, "Lower Egypt," stands in strong contrast to the higher, upstream areas of "Upper Egypt" further south.

Centralized Land Allocation. All land belonged to the Pharaoh, and after the flood it was allocated to farmers for their use in an elaborate national surveying. Scholars do not know quite how this worked, but apparently amounts of land allocated to different families could vary from year to year, and apparently the division was perceived as fair (or at least inevitable), since we do not have evidence of land riots or other protests over who got how much land to farm.

Priest Bureaucrats. Responsibility for land surveys and for local administration in general lay with a class of priest-bureaucrats, who seem usually to have been literate, although their papyrus records do not survive. (Much papyrus survives from ancient Egyptian tombs, due to their being located in the dry desert fringes of the valley, but people did not put bureaucratic memos in tombs; they put in religious texts.)

Surplus Labor Force.
The annual cycle of the Nile imposed a high demand for agricultural labor in some months, but effectively prohibited agricultural work in others. The "excess labor" force seems to have been available for a range of public works, the most famous of which are the pyramids of the Old Kingdom.

Variation in Agricultural Water. The amount of the Nile flood was not always the same. Conditions like El Niño affect rainfall in the upper reaches of the river drainage far to the south, producing floods or droughts.
[Note 4]

River Trade. Extensive trade was carried out up and down the river, which is wide and deep most of the way from Aswan to the sea. The wind generally blows from north to south, but the river flows from south to north, so spreading sails could carry a small craft southward, while the current alone could carry it northward.

Elaborate Burial Practices. Among the elite, a great deal of effort appears to have been spent on death and the dead. Although embalming as such does not appear until the New Kingdom, the practice of desiccating bodies and then binding them in wrappings full of charms and talismans seems to have been present from very early times.
[Note 5]
There was always a great deal of variation in the amount of wealth expended on the dead, and the modest graves of ordinary Egyptians suggest that they may have more pressing problems to deal with than glorifying the dead as the elite did.

Animal Worship.
Selected animals representing gods and/or regions, were deliberately housed and cared for in some temples, and were mummified on occasion. (The tombs of bulls in northern Egypt and the mummified crocodiles of Kom Ombo are probably the most famous examples.)

Psychological Traits. More than for almost any other area of the world, scholars have speculated on the psychological effects of environment in ancient Egypt. Although they have been speculative, compelling arguments have been made that living in the relatively isolated valley system of ancient Egypt was conducive to several features of Egyptian character throughout the ancient period, such as:

a sense of timelessness and continuity, linked to the exaggerated annual calendar caused by the flooding of the Nile, and including an almost obsessive sense of the cosmic significance of alternation, including alternation between life and death;

a self-conscious recognition of the need to cooperate and relatively reduced sense of private ownership, caused by the need to recalculate land boundaries after each year's flood;

a sense of the necessity to conform to social demands given the constant presence of the Red Land as the obvious place of exile for non-conformists;

a great deal of cultural similarity up and down the river due to river commerce, combined with a suspicion of non-Egyptians and their ways;

a constant awareness of the Delta being different from Upper Egypt, and a tendency for political factionalization to occur along this differentiation.

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